English 381 Spring 2012
Literature of the Bible Prof. David Richter
Syllabus
One of the foundations on which Western culture has been built, the narratives of the Bible are strange mixtures of myth, legend and history, both richly compelling and tremendously difficult to interpret. They were composed over many hundreds of years, written, rewritten and redacted to reflect the shifting historical situations of their storytellers and editors, situations we can reconstruct with the aid of the narratives themselves. Meanwhile, as the heirs, like it or not, of Western culture, we ourselves are formed by the biblical narratives that have been recast by the likes of Chaucer and Milton, Melville and Morrison.
This course will introduce the student to the Bible and to some of the ways used to study it today. After reviewing the main narrative sequence from Genesis through 2 Kings, the gospels and the apocalypses, we will start our analysis with the so-called "higher criticism," the historical and text-critical analysis of biblical narratives. We will explore the problem of translation, the distortions that occur when rewriting a Hebrew or Greek text in contemporary English. Then we will push on to explore the powers and limitations of contemporary modes of biblical interpretation, including (among others) the archetypal criticism of Northrop Frye, the formalist insights of Robert Alter, the narratological approaches of Meir Sternberg, and the feminist critiques of Mieke Bal.
Effectively we will be reading the Bible more or less sequentially in September and October, and exploring critical approaches to biblical texts in November and December. We will not be reading through the entire Bible but will cover substantial portions of the following books: Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Jonah, Ruth, Job, Daniel, Mark, Matthew, Luke, Revelation.
Required Texts:
The Oxford Study Bible. Revised English Bible with Apocrypha. (Oxford UP)
Well, not exactly required. Please buy this or any other Bible you fancy. This one happens to have at least minimal annotations and some interesting essays, though you may find as I do that the editors irritatingly tiptoe around some of the issues that would be controversial in fundamentalist territories.
Norman Gottwald: The Hebrew Bible: A Socio-Literary Introduction. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985. A great reference text for doing Bible-as-literature, in explicating the very complicated relationships between the historical moments described in books of the Bible and the periods in which those books were actually written. Gives a strong sense of the Bible as a social text, as reflecting in narrative art the changes over more than a millenium of the economic, political and religious life of the people who produced it.
The rest of the required readings will be criticism, mainly by widely known scholars, but some of it by myself, which will be made available on BlackBoard, a private website available only to students in this course. Copies of the book chapters and critical articles will be available on that site, which you will be able to access from computers in the library and in computer labs on campus, and also from home. Full copies of the most important texts will be on reserve (I hope) in Rosenthal.
Full copies of the most important texts will be on reserve (I hope) in Rosenthal. Some of the books on reserve, including Frye's The Great Code, Alter's Art of Biblical Narrative, are available in paperback, well distributed, and reasonably cheap to own, but I have not ordered them. In addition, I shall be placing various ancillary texts on reserve: the Anchor series of translations with commentary; a Hebrew/English interlinear translation; Bernhard Anderson's textbook on the Bible as literature; an edition of the parallel Near-Eastern texts from the archaic period; plus materials plus works of contemporary criticism we probably won't have time to go over in class.
One final source you may want to acquire is the Online Bible. This consists of a display program with a series of modules many of which are FREE for the downloading. It can be somewhat tricky to set up but once it is done, you can set your screen so that it simultaneously displays different translations and versions of the Bible (or, if you have the languages, the original Hebrew or Greek, or Jerome's Latin Vulgate). Or you can look at the three synoptic gospels in three parallel columns on your screen, to see their similarities and differences. Or you can look at a translation of the Septuagint, which sometimes differs from the accepted Hebrew text. Or it can be used as a concordance program that will allow you to search for different usages of words, or to check if a particular phrase occurs elsewhere. The uses are many and the URLs where you can download this program are http://www.online-Bible.com and www.answersingenesis.org
For recommended websites, see the BlackBoard site.
Written Work:
Several short papers on biblical themes and texts, on such issues as translation-as-interpretation, reduplications and reinterpretations of biblical narratives, the Bible in Western literary texts. Hopefully no final examination.
Tentative Schedule
Week 1: Introduction to the Course.
Elementary questions. 1. What is the Bible? 2. Differences between the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. The issue of the canon. 3. Problems of transmission. 4. Problems of translation. 5. Problems of historical dating and the relationship between the text and the events purportedly narrated. 6. Differences between the Bible and other ancient literatures on account of the cultural uses that have been made of scripture. 7. Biblical texts as composites, collectively written and edited from disparate documents.
Week 2: Genesis.
Since there is no prerequisite of a previous Bible-as-lit course, we need to begin the course proper with a fast-and-dirty overview of the main narrative sequence (Genesis through Kings, plus the Gospels and the most important apocalyptic narratives) to establish the structural relations of these narratives. We are not going to be doing close reading at this stage: that is what the rest of the course will be about. The point is to get a sense of the sweep and the structure of the history as a whole and of individual books as making up major elements in that whole.
Critical Reading: None but please read appropriate chapters in Gottwald for this and the next two sessions.
Biblical Reading: Genesis.
Look over also some of the selections from James B. Pritchard, ed. Ancient Near Eastern Texts.
Week 3: Out of Egypt to the Promised Land
Biblical Reading: Exodus 1-20, 32-34, Numbers 11-14, 16, 20-25, 31; Deuteronomy 1-4, 28, 31, 34; Joshua 1-12
Week 4: Judges, Samuel, Saul, David
Biblical Reading: Judges, 1 Samuel
Critical Reading: Selections from Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Israel (1879). Mattitiahu Tzevat, "Israelite History and the Historical Books of the Old Testament."
Week 5: The Davidic Monarchy -- Rise, Decline, Fall
Biblical Reading: 2 Samuel through 2 Kings
Critical Texts: None
Week 6: Shorter Biblical Narratives
Biblical Texts: Ruth, Jonah, Job (abridged), Esther
Week 7: The Gospels
Biblical Texts: Mark, Matthew, Luke, John.
Critical Reading: Helms: from Who Wrote the Gospels
Week 8: The Apocalyptic Narratives
Biblical Texts: Daniel, Revelation
Week 9:
Literary Approaches: Formalist Criticism: Narrative as Thematic Form
Critical Reading: Erich Auerbach: "Odysseus's Scar" from Mimesis. Robert Alter: Chapter 3 from The World of Biblical Literature
Return to Genesis and Samuel
Week 10: Archetypal and Authorial Criticism:
Critical Reading: selections from Northrop Frye: The Great Code; Harold Bloom: The Book of J
Biblical Texts: All over the map.
Week 11: Structuralist-Semiotic Criticism
Critical Reading: Selection from J. P. Fokkelman, “The Tower of Babel” in Narrative Art in Genesis: Specimens of Stylistic and Structural Analysis. Roland Barthes: "The Struggle with the Angel: Textual Analysis of Genesis 32"
Biblical Texts: Genesis
Week 12: Phenomenological Reader-Oriented Criticism
Critical Reading: Meir Sternberg: The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading, chapter 6.
Biblical Text: Genesis, 2 Samuel;
Week 13: The Bible Meets Gender and Queer Theory
Critical Texts: Chapters from the following books: Phyllis Trible: Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives. Mieke Bal: Lethal Loves: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories. Theodore W. Jennings, Jr., “YHWH as Erastes” from Ken Stone ed., Queer Commentary and the Hebrew Bible. Recommended: Stephen Moore, God’s Gym: Divine Male Bodies of the Bible.
Texts: selections from 2 Samuel, Judges, Mark, Talmud Bavli, Bava Metzia.
Week 14:
The Bible's Interpretive Communities: The World of Midrash
Critical Readings: James Kugel: "The Assembly of Ladies" from In Potiphar's House; Emmanuel Levinas: "And God Created Woman" from Nine Talmudic Readings; David Richter, "Midrash and Mashal in the Blessing of Esau" from Narrative. Biblical and Midrashic Texts: Genesis; Selections from Genesis Rabbah